butter scraped over too much bread

I was feeling a little rough today, trying not to get a sneezy-wheezy cold and realising I hadn’t had a proper day off in ages. And I was also worrying that, while I’m starting new projects, I haven’t had time to give them much thought lately. So I got on my bicycle and cycled my favourite Thames Path route, passing lots of ducks splashing in the canals, a man who laughed like a duck while talking on his mobile, a woman in hijab practicing kickboxing, and zooming through lots of photo-takers’ pictures on Tower Bridge. I guess since everyone stayed inside during yesterday’s hurricanes, the families were out in force today.

Here’s the gorgeous Mariscal mural at the Design Museum. (Click here for a wallpaper type photo.)

I noticed a homemade commemoration sign that I’d never spotted before, nailed to the top of one of the piles. Made me wonder what it was like in the old days, when people did more swimming in the Thames.

I was wondering about this new structure in the river by Rotherhithe: does anyone know what it is? It’s some sort of rig, but I can’t for the life of me work out why it’s there.

close-ups:

When I sat down in the cafe, I spent several hours scribbling in my notebook. Not drawing or writing stories, just trying to figure out where I’m at right now. On Friday I’d met up with one of my best friends, Mags, who lives in Brussels and who is one of the most sensible, sorted people I’ve met, and we had a good talk. She’s done amazing things and has a fancy postgraduate degree from LSE, but she took a year off with her partner to travel the world and work some very unusual manual labour jobs, like milking goats in South America and washing bedsheets in the Iona Community laundry. Anyway, meeting up with her always makes me think a lot.

So today I started by coming up with some questions for myself, then spent the rest of the time trying to answer them. I wish I could answer them better than I do. I’m painfully aware that twenty years from now, if I looked at my answers, they’d seem so trite and uninformed. But I have to start somewhere.

-What’s really important to me? What am I passionate about?
-What do I want to say about those things?
-What do I most need to work on?
-What are the best things I’m doing now?
-Who are my favourite people? Why?
-Who are the people I most want to help out? What’s my motivation?
-Is the world a better place because I’m in it? Why or why not?

So my answers were ranging from large-scale issues like global warming to how to be kinder to Stuart, etc. Lots of things I still need to think about, not to mention getting around to writing more stories.

Then in the evening, Stuart cooked a lovely Delia Smith dinner and I helped my neighbour friend with her homework, which was actually very interesting, an illustrated summary of a field trip to Kew Gardens. (We like Kew Gardens.)

Mags in the Peckham Rye Park cafe, and neighbour friend – Just to say, if her teacher’s reading this, she did all the work, we just spent a long time discussing layout issues and how to mix paint.